Early season goose hunts feel completely different from our late season hunts. The weather is warm, bordering on screaming hot. The daily limit is 10 birds instead of 1, and it seems that you’re either where the birds want to be, or you’re not.
This time of the year, it’s pretty hopeless trying to turn a flock that is headed somewhere else, but when you have freshly chopped corn and a half dozen people scouting every day, you can sometimes set up right under where they want to be.
This season, I was invited to one of these “we found them” hunts. I showed up, we waited for the evening flight, and in short order we had a pile of birds on the ground. While the yield from a hunt like this is equal to a month of me and Rachel picking away at birds in the late season, there is a variable that makes things a little more difficult. The heat.
Geese are big, they have a lot of thermal mass, and a lot of insulation to keep that heat in. Getting the birds into the shade and hung up with some airflow helps a lot. Piling them up is a recipe for a few green geese at the bottom of the pile. Luckily, we have access to some walk-in coolers where we can hang the birds to cool. And while I generally recommend aging most waterfowl for a few days, I try to get these warm weather geese cleaned as soon as possible.
Which leads to a second jarring difference between the early and late season. We pluck almost every bird we kill, from doves to ducks to turkey. But with a pile of lean geese and high temps, we usually skin out these birds. While I prefer to cook goose with the skin on in almost every recipe, having a bunch of skinless goose legs was a good excuse to make some goose sausage.
I’ve been tinkering with the recipe for a few seasons now: a classic maple breakfast sausage. This sausage has just enough maple syrup to create those sticky bits of char on the patties when you cook them, and the classic smell and taste of a legit country diner.
I used trimmings from pork belly for this, but any fatty pork will do. You can even use bacon ends if you want some smoky flavor, but like with most things with bacon in it, it’ll mostly taste like bacon. Also, bite the bullet and get real high quality maple syrup. It makes a difference.
Unlike most of our sausage recipes, we leave this sausage in bulk form (un-cased), usually shaping them into patties or crumbling them into eggs or other brunchy shit. I highly recommend double grinding this sausage, once through a medium die, then a fine one. This yields a consistent texture, and the extra grinding works the sausage and makes it stickier, which forms better patties.
If you find yourself hunting in a t-shirt in a freshly chopped field with a pile of honkers, you could do worse than to make a big batch of this sausage for the cold mornings to come.
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